SimCity 4 did a lot to modernize Maxis' classic city-building game, extending the formula to make cities a part of regional networks and packing cities full of visual detail. But it had a number of rough edges when it was first released at the beginning of the year, which naturally provided extra opportunities for the developers to improve the game and have it live up to its potential. For those who missed the significant patches released in the first half of the year, which fixed a range of performance and stability issues and added missing features like SimcityScape, an online city exchange mode, Maxis did make good. Rush Hour packages those improvements and takes the next step by adding such useful features that you'll wonder why they weren't in the original game.

Rush Hour makes it easier to appreciate and address sims' long commutes.

As the title implies, Rush Hour is all about dealing with transportation--and angry sims riled up about long commute times. A handful of new road and other transportation options and some new tools for diagnosing traffic problems are the core of what's new. It also makes transportation a more hands-on affair, literally putting you in control of land, air, and sea vehicles that can be driven around just for fun or in a series of missions. And while traffic is not something that ever goes away in any but the most ideal city, the new options can provide some much-needed relief for commute-weary inhabitants, which can make them that much happier and willing to pay up at tax time. Rush Hour also adds content that isn't focused on the traffic theme, including reward buildings like the new space center. Such additions are almost too minor to note, but they do round out the game as a whole, which makes sense considering that Rush Hour installs as an update rather than as a stand-alone game. SimCity 4 together with the Rush Hour expansion are functionally identical to the new compilation, SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition.

SimCity has always presented a good case for mass transportation, and very dense downtown areas will still be best served by a good bus and subway system, but the new road options help to fill in the gaps and make cities look a lot more like those in the real world. By far the most essential are avenues, double-wide boulevards that let cars travel faster and in higher volumes. With flower-bed-laden median strips and big intersections, they are more elegant and effective than the old SimCity stopgap of laying down ordinary roads in double lines--how could we live without them? The other additions are also fairly obvious extensions of what the game already offered: One-way streets are cheaper than avenues but take more planning, ground-level highways are cheaper than deluxe elevated ones but are harder to connect to streets, and elevated rail is cheaper than subway lines (and it can tie in to an existing underground network) but takes surface space. And for times when only rail will do, there's the fast monorail, which is also conveniently elevated.

Take a hands-on approach with the driving missions, which can earn you money, rating points, and new buildings.

The region concept of SimCity 4 completely changed how cities could be built, by letting you create cities that existed purely as job magnets, power generators, and garbage dumps to keep your population centers pristine. Some of the new enhancements make it easier to create and manage regional transportation networks, starting with a new overlay on the region map that lets you see how cities connect at a glance. Far-off cities spread around a bay or along a river can now be connected almost effortlessly with passenger and car ferries, which of course aren't as fast as bridges but are far more economical. Layering different transportation networks--connecting buses to subways to rail to ferries and so on--is a great solution for getting more bang for your buck and reducing travel times around town or to a neighboring city. With the parking garage, now suburban drivers can also take part in mass transportation networks, letting them drive from bedroom communities to garages strategically placed at transportation hubs.